Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

April 30, 2010

It’s been said that the two hardest parts of a project are the beginning and the end. In the middle, it’s often perfectly clear what should have gone differently at the start. But when you’re kicking off a project, you’re often so preoccupied trying to establish cordial working relationships and understand the nature of the project that some of the trivial but essential details get neglected. That’s too bad, because it’s often the trivial essentials that build trust.

April 29, 2010

The main benefit of adopting Facebook’s authentication system that I have seen on my site, FanFeedr.com, is the complete absence of having to pay for moderation. At Viacom, we had moderation costs in the tens of thousands of dollars each month, adding up to over $500,000 annually. Facebook Authentication is the closest you are going to get to real identity, so the moderation becomes less important/unnecessary

The plan all along was to have Plastic run alongside FEED and Suck, with extensive overlap. Plastic hosted all the discussion forums for FEED and Suck articles; FEED and Suck editors helped curate stories for Plastic. There was some vague plan to use the Plastic threads as a farm league where talented writers could make a name for themselves before graduating up to "the show" of FEED and Suck. As a business, we thought -- accurately -- that Plastic could be much bigger in terms of page views and unique visitors, and so would complement the smaller audience size, but more polished content at FEED and Suck. (We'd be able to show advertisers both reach and quality, in other words.) I still think it's a model that might work for someone, but we didn't really get to try it out, because the dot.com bubble burst right as we were closing our initial financing, and our institutional and strategic investors—Lycos Ventures, Advance Internet—chose to let the company run out of cash, rather than to support us through the dark ages of 2001-2003. (I say that, by the way, with no malice—it really was a dark time, and if I had been in their shoes I might have made the same call.)

From a post by Steven Johnson about an n+1 article about webism and the history of Feed, Suck, and Plastic.

I'm very ambivalent about SBJ on a personal level (you just don't play golf with someone the day before you fire them if have any expectation of them continuing to think of you as any kind of gentleman for example) but I will grant that he is a very smart man, and on this a few years ahead.

I have decided to show you the “Unwritten Rulebook.” Understand that what I am doing is going to bother a lot of players. But it is time for you to see this. You will notice that the rules are presented in outline form. There is a rule and its corresponding definition. In the end there is a summary and finally instructions about who can and cannot see this.

April 25, 2010

A campaign that is scheduled to begin on Monday will carry the theme “The real Kodak moment happens when you share.” That is different from the longtime meaning of the words: a special instant that is — or ought to be — captured in a photograph...“It’s not a Kodak moment unless you share,” said Jeffrey W. Hayzlett, chief marketing officer at the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester.

April 23, 2010

Although I am not a market technician, my spider sense is tingling. The wheels of capitalism are back in motion, and liquidity is flowing from the top to the bottom of the cap structure. University endowments are trying to distinguish deal flow quality from the PayPal mafia versus the Xoogler community; Web 1.0 bankers are reuniting to capitalize on the coming Web 2.0 IPO liquidity, and startups with big ideas, hockey stick user growth, but relatively little revenue, are commanding eight figure Series A valuations.
Markets tend to overact on the way up and on the way down, so we may well see an extended period of bullishness over the coming months or even years. The Nasdaq has another 100% to go before it gets into the same trough to peak range we saw 10 years ago. The bubble needs to wait for companies like Facebook, Groupon and Twitter to transition from privately held to publicly traded before bursting. But burst it will, as it always does. Not before, however, some very fortunate entrepreneurs, investors and bankers make out with new fortunes.

April 19, 2010

April 18, 2010

Inspired by the possibility of a legal complaint from the Park Slope Food Coop about the misuse of the word Co-Op by Barney's as they get set to open their Brooklyn Store, I decided to attend their monthly general meeting. After snacking on some nice hors d'oeuvres and a cocktail, I was able to grab a copy of their agenda to share with you all.

Barney's Co-Op General Meeting

Tonight's Agenda

Open Forum

A report from the child labor committee on the little fingers that do the needlework on the couture collections

An amendment to encourage the sale of goods made from exotic leathers

A report from the diversity committee supporting choice in heel height

A clarification of the Clotheshangers' Gazette's Editorial Policy on printing letters from designers

Exemption from work slot duty for members who spend over $75,000 a year at the Co-Op

April 17, 2010

Are civits completely wired? Will this photo put an end to this? Will the debate between farmed civit shit and free-range civit shit continue? Are there other "gourmet" shit foods? If I give beans to my cat (or my toddler) will it have a little something? So many questions...

April 12, 2010

Somewhat excited to explore Flywheel, an indoor cycling place that opened across the street from my office. Was thinking when I was cleared to exercise again that it could be cool to duck out during lunch. But I also just discovered that it is co-owned by Tiki Barber and that just killed my interest.

Just discovered a Calvin Trillin like all empenada lunch trail around my office.
Stop 1: Eisenberg's 22 and 5th for a pastrami empenada (to go)
Stop 2: Uncle Mo's 18th between 5&6th for a rice pudding empenada
jog or brisk walk back to the office.

April 02, 2010

I've spent ten years now on Boing Boing, finding cool things that people have done and made and writing about them. Most of the really exciting stuff hasn't come from big corporations with enormous budgets, it's come from experimentalist amateurs. These people were able to make stuff and put it in the public's eye and even sell it without having to submit to the whims of a single company that had declared itself gatekeeper for your phone and other personal technology.

(Obviously one day I will buy one of these and am excited about some of the possibilities. But I just don't think it is the second coming and am really tired of bad ahistorical writing and breathless hyperbole from people covering media industries for whom the "web" is only a partial cause of their current business problems)

Was listening to WNYC last night when I heard the head of marketing at Zinio start in on the now really boring, and I think false idea idea that:

"Websites are designed for what might be called a “lean forward” experience: You're online at a computer, often searching with some purpose.

“Magazines, on the other hand, are about the opposite experience,” Mullen says, “where you're sitting back with a brand that you trust and you're letting them guide your interest level.”

She then went on to talk about people sitting in a nail salon flipping through pages of Us Weekly. "You're not really searching for Rhianna". That is true. I think you are sitting there bored, waiting for your nails to dry and flipping through the free magazines that were either offered to the nail salon for a few cents, or ones left by other customers who were also bored and needed something to flip through. Hell maybe she is right that someone will create a way for people getting manicures to flick pages on their ipads without mussing their polish, if so then Zinio will be perfectly positioned to help save the magazine industry by creating paid digital versions that really bring to life, lean back service and celebrity journalism.